Facebook + Last.fm + YouTube = ‘MTV’ With Music You Actually Like

Plenty of web music apps take advantage of YouTube’s huge catalog of free music in the form of videos, many of which can be embedded on other sites. Now that televisions are learning how to run apps, music services that filter and repackage the millions of free songs on YouTube into music television-like channels are capable of offering a bigger — and in many cases, better-sounding — musical experience than ever before.

Enter an artist into ListAndPlay’s search box, and up pops a list of songs by that artist, either in your web browser or on your television (using Google TV or another web-capable set-top box). Select the song you want to form the basis of your customized music television channel, and ListAndplay will check with Last.fm to see which songs are most similar to that song and scrape the associated videos from YouTube in seconds to present the whole shebang in seconds as 150-song video playlist, which is more videos than you’d likely see on MTV in a day — and even better, they’ll be videos you want to see.

Listandplay creator Jonathan Bouman sent this image of his service running on a Google TV.

In addition to grabbing song recommendations from Last.fm and videos from YouTube, ListAndPlay is also friends with Facebook. Not only does it allow you to share your station with friends — as one would expect, because everyone’s always trying to get us to tell all our friends about everything these days — but this service also lets you watch a video playlist of music your Facebook friends have “liked,” which is a helpful feature, and helps the listener discover new music through their friends.

Again, this idea of filtering YouTube videos and turning them into a “lean back” music experience is nothing new. It’s the ongoing convergence of web apps and televisions, with their large screens and (often) surround sound systems, which makes this truly exciting.